Two years ago, PeopleForBikes launched the Green Lane Project
to help focus attention and expertise around something that we decided
was going to be the next big thing in city biking: the protected bike
lane.

It's always nice to be right.

As the thermoplastic dries on this year's round of terrific protected
bike lane projects, we decided to scour the country for a comprehensive
(and subjective) ranking of the best of the best. We talked to experts
and advocates around the country, looked at technical photos and schemes
and read the news reports to understand not just how these bike lanes
were designed, but why. Though the word "complete" can be hard to define
for something as malleable as a city street, every project on this page
has been in some clear sense finished during this year.

Here's what we found.

1) Dearborn Street, Chicago

Chicago’s 1.2-mile showpiece isn’t the country’s most sophisticated
downtown bikeway because of its on-street markings, though they’re excellent,
or its quick-and-simple plastic-post barriers. The really remarkable
thing about Dearborn is that bikes get their own traffic signals. Maybe
that's why stoplight compliance has soared from 31 percent to 81 percent and bike traffic has more than doubled since the lane went in. Did we mention that one of its local fans has given the lane its own Twitter feed? We challenge any other street project in the country to inspire such devotion.

2) Indianapolis Cultural Trail

A labor 15 years in the making, Indy's Cultural Trail
(which includes 1.5 lane-miles of on-street protected bikeways) shows
how physically beautiful a great on-street bikeway can be — and how a
first-rate facility can stimulate real estate development nearby: more
than $100 million by the time it officially opened in May. No wonder
Mayor Greg Ballard, a Republican, has been known to stop by the city
bike coordinator's office to ask, "What's next?"

3) Guadalupe Street, Austin

The half-mile spine of Austin's university district
is now one of the country's best examples of a complete street, with
pedestrian-friendly shops, bus stops and a first-rate bike facility that
connects to other lanes in an integrated network. In a time when many
U.S. cities still ban comfortable biking from busy commercial corridors,
Austin is showing why they're actually a perfect match.

4) Fell and Oak Streets, San Francisco

Near intersections on Oak, green striping replaces plastic posts to show that bike and car traffic must merge. Photo: SFBC.

They run for just a quarter mile each, but for San Franciscans, these
lanes make all the difference for a couplet of much-traveled roads that
also serve as crosstown arterials for cars. Removing auto parking here
was the key to a low-stress connection between Golden Gate Park and The Wiggle, the old riverbed that is now the city's most popular east-west bikeway. Plans for more permanent planters are in the works.

5) Linden Avenue, Seattle

Seattle's philosophy on protected bike lanes is influenced by its
northern neighbor, Vancouver BC: do them up nice the first time, with an
artful combination of posts, low concrete curbs, drainage ditches,
dedicated traffic signals and plentiful painted markings. There's no
better example of that than Linden Avenue, a useful connector in a
far-north neighborhood that Seattle Bike Blog (maker of the video above)
rightly called "world class."

6) First Avenue, New York City

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to reverse course on a plan to add
great bike lanes to upper First and Second Avenues, East Harlem didn't
stand for it. "I pay my taxes like everyone else, and we deserve the
same treatment north of 96th Street," resident James Garcia testified. With the help of City Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito,
good sense prevailed. First Avenue now has a protected bike lane from
72nd to 125th Streets. "I’m not only a cyclist but a mom with four kids
who all cycle, and also a driver. It makes complete sense," said Peggy
Morales, who chaired the committee that recommended that the lanes
replace 166 on-street parking spaces. "We should be able to go cycling
without having to take our lives into our own hands." Yep.

7) Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago

A bike box on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago. Photo: CDOT.

The success of Milwaukee Avenue's new mile or so of better bike lanes,
which combine physically protected lanes with stretches buffered by
paint, is a lesson to planners: the best place to put a buffered lane
isn't necessarily where you wish people would pedal, but where they're
already pedaling. It's the same principle as sidewalks, which are built
along desire lines that people naturally carve out. Biking is so important to Milwaukee Avenue that when this project came under fire, three local retail joints on the corridor piped up in its defense.

10) Overton Park Road, Memphis

Photo: City of Memphis.

Here's the most remarkable thing about this protected bike lane,
Memphis's first: In 2010, this city didn't have a single bike lane of
any kind. In the three years that followed, this storied city on the
Mississippi has made a new name for itself
by making advanced bike lanes like this one standard on all new
repaving projects of its majestically wide thoroughfares. The first
great song about biking in Memphis? Only a matter of time.

The Green Lane Project is
a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes
to create low-stress streets. Correction: An earlier version of this
post confused "avenue" with "street" in Atlanta and New York.